Keep on pushing

30th May 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund Lewis
Editor

There are a lot of people in this city who just don’t get it.

I reflected on that fact recently after watching a white gentleman on the local news blame the mayor for essentially causing dissension between Black and whites residents when there had not been any before this whole Confederate monuments thing. All I could do was shake my head and chuckle at my naiveté in thinking that Black folks were the only people in this city, state and nation that have been robbed of a decent education.

This gentleman was clearly misinformed about race relations in this city and must have never crossed paths with a Black man or woman who wasn’t “raised in captivity” or didn’t mind taking off “the mask” every now and then to set a white brother or sister straight.

For the record, things aren’t all good in the Big Easy. Things have never really been good for the Black masses in New Orleans since the city was founded. The masses of our people still live at or below the poverty line, many of us are still being robbed of a decent public education by folks from other parts of the country looking for public school laboratory rats or members of the business community with their own agenda. Blacks are still being routinely railroaded and unconstitutionally prosecuted by the district attorney, we are still being locked out of the public bidding process at City Hall and also get the short end of the stick with regard to housing and health care.

The situation for Black folks in this city was bad before the City of New Orleans began taking down the four Confederate-era monuments this spring and now that the Robert E. Lee monument is a thing of the past, Black folks are still disproportionately represented among the city’s poorest, most undereducated, unemployed and politically ignored residents.

We’re still being profiled, abused and targeted by unconstitutional law enforcement agencies and are routinely being treated like third-class citizens in this majority-Black city.

When it comes to the struggle of Black folks in this city, some of our white brothers and sisters don’t have a clue. Like the monument supporter who compared taking down the four Confederate-era monuments to taking down the Statue of Liberty in New York City.

The poor soul didn’t realize that he was inserting his foot in his mouth since the U.S. fumbled on the Statue of Liberty monument. It was a gift from France, America’s oldest ally, and was conceived with Lady Liberty being a Black woman, a reference to the enslaved population of the United States. But the powers that be were having none of that nonsense and altered the design to make Lady Liberty appear to be a Caucasian woman.

Only a group of people with a system in place to ensure that they win every time could afford to be so ignorant of history.

You seldom hear whites talk about the fact that George Washington, the so-called “Father” of this nation, owned Black slaves or that President Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his Black mistress and slave, Sally Hemings. Nor do you hear a lot of talk about how President Abraham Lincoln was adamant about shipping Black men, women and children off to Sierra Leone, Haiti or some other part of the world once they were emancipated.

Despite evidence to the contrary, the Civil War was not fought to free Black slaves. It was fought to settle a financial dispute between Northern and Southern states which grew out of the economic advantage slavery gave Southern planters over their Northern counterparts.

People don’t often talk about how New Orleans was once the epicenter of the domestic slave trade and how brutal conditions in these parts were used by plantation owners to our north to keep rebellious slaves in line. No one wanted to be traded “down south” to a city like New Orleans where the wealthy white oppressor’s foot was firmly planted on the necks of the enslaved and free people of color were sometimes used to undermine and control the Black masses.

If the furor over these monuments and the monuments themselves underscore nothing else, they reveal how little has changed with regard to creating a just, humane and equitable society since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.

We still see the great-great grandchildren of wealthy and powerful slaveowners being groomed to control economics, politics and the justice system in New Orleans and the great-great grandchildren of enslaved Africans being relegated to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

Given the effectiveness and efficiency with which the powers that be have made it a crime to be Black in New Orleans, it is no wonder that the Crescent City is the Mass Incarceration Capital of the World and the state of Louisiana is the Prison Capital of the World.

In the spirit of Mama D, Mama Dyan French Cole, it is way past time for Black folks to wake up and stop killing each other. We need brave, principled visionaries to lead us out of this madness and inspire us to be our best selves.

Long live the spirit of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, The North Star, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the MOVE organization, the Million Man and Million Woman Marches and the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Stand up, raise your voice and do everything in your power to move the struggle for liberation, justice and equity forward.

Harambee.

This article originally published in the May 29, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.